A presentation program can be generally considered as being a computer software package used to display information on a particular topic. The information can be displayed through “slides” (also known as “sheets” or “foils”) on a display screen. More recently a presentation paradigm has emerged where a user can zoom in and out on portions of an infinitely expandable “canvas”, rather than presenting a linear sequence of slides.
A presentation program usually combines three major functions: an editor that allows text to be inserted and formatted, a module for inserting and manipulating graphical images, and a slide-show system to display the contents.
Currently available presentation applications generally have broad applicability. They are typically easy to learn, they generally do not constrain the order in which the user develops a presentation, and they can provide narrative structure in the same medium used in the final presentation. However, even with all of these features consistency management across slides is the responsibility of a user.
As currently available presentation applications lack a meta-model and semantic support, making a change to the content or styling of a sheet does not result in relevant changes being made to all related sheets. The end result is that every change, no matter how small, must be made manually to other locations and sheets affected by the change.
Also, while a presentation application is primarily designed for displaying ideas, frequently users work out those ideas in the application itself. In other words, they use sheets to collect data, classify the data, establish some relationships among data elements, and only then craft a presentation sheet that is included in the slide show. The unused sheets are typically “stored” at the end of the presentation, like additional cards piled on at the end of a deck, and simply not shown to the audience. Keeping all of the sheets in one common “deck” encumbers both the workflow and the presentation itself.
Some currently available presentation applications allow for layout templates that provide a consistent “look” to the slides in a presentation. The color of the background, the size of the headings and other stylistic features can be pre-selected by a user who wishes to apply these layout specifics to all the sheets of a presentation. However, in accordance with conventional practice a user cannot create a template on the basis of the content, i.e., a template that can be applied to all items in a predefined category.